Brother Termite (22 page)

THE HOUSE
was
empty, but not in the way Langley had been. It was as if the house had simply taken a breath and in a moment the children would return, carried on the warm, muffin-scented wind, to pick up the doll left on the chair, the mittens forgotten on the floor.

Reen slid his finger down one side of the long breakfast-strewn table and thought he could feel in the wood the vibration of high piping voices, of laughter, of small running feet.

The house remembered. It would remember for a long, long time.

Finally, hefting the tote, he walked out to the small runner they had left him. A glance at his watch. He was surprised to see it was only twenty minutes to eight, time enough to finish his duty.

All duties finished sometime, he thought as he lifted the ship into the clear morning air. All projects, all lives had an end. If he could, he would go to Mars when he was done. There he would spin out the remainder of his days, watching his daughter grow up and his own race die.

In a few centuries the Cousins would fade in the new race’s memory like photographs in a family album. But the children wouldn’t completely forget.

Here’s my grandfather. He had a farm in Ohio.

Reen remembered looking at the family album Jeff had once placed in his lap.

And my grandfather on my father’s side. Here. Here’s a picture of him in Poland.

Perhaps Angela’s children would inherit from the humans that specific love of family rather than the Cousins’ generic love of race. If they did, Reen would grow old and sweet and distant, as Jeff’s round-faced grandfather in Poland or the laughing Ohio farmer with his arm around his pudgy wife.

Below Reen, a few early risers in Falls Church were going outside to pick their papers from the lawn. Cars drove in a leisurely Saturday morning pace to the store or a weekend shift of work. It all looked very peaceful.

He took a moment to fly past the White House one more time, and even that huge building seemed sleepy. Angling southeast, he sailed over the poor neighborhoods of Washington and the boats bobbing on the sparkling Potomac. A few minutes later he lowered the ship on the flat center of hard white spume that was the Cousin complex in Anacostia.

The bag over his shoulder, he strode past the parked ships to the nearest door. A Cousin in the hall, apparently recognizing Reen, hurriedly turned his face away.

Reen said, “I know you’re not supposed to hear me, but I came to bring you news, and you must listen. The humans will attack in an hour. Call everyone together and get them to safety.”

The Cousin walked down the hall, and Reen couldn’t be sure he was going to warn the others. He headed to one of the communication centers and on the way passed a Brother.

“Kredin?” he asked.

Kredin’s eyes immediately sought sanctuary on the floor. Reen put out a claw to stop him, but Kredin changed course slightly to avoid the touch.

“The humans will attack in a little while,” Reen said to the retreating back. “Get everyone together and into the ships.” He watched his Brother disappear around a curve in the corridor. Kredin did not quicken his stride.

As Reen walked toward the communication modules, he lifted his arm to look at the Rolex and stopped mid-stride. The time.

Time had run out.

It was nine o’clock. When he had looked at the watch before, it was twenty to nine, not twenty to eight. He had never learned to read anything but a digital.

He ran headlong down the corridor. Ahead stood three Cousins in a gossipy knot.

“Get out!” Reen screamed as he raced toward them, the wet soles of his boots beating a frantic slap-slap on the soft shiny floor.

They turned in tandem, curiosity and disgust in their eyes. And in tandem they looked away.

Reen ran. His breath came in hard painful gulps. The gun bumped crazily at his side. At the first communications module, his feet nearly slid out from under him, and he grabbed a doorjamb to stay his fall.

In the room a Cousin sat before a screen, calmly talking to another Cousin in another communications room. He looked up, then jerked his head away.

“Who are you talking to?”

The Cousin didn’t answer. He continued his calm conversation.

Reen pushed him out of the chair and shouted into the terminal. “Tell everyone! The humans are attacking!”

The distant Cousin on the screen stood and walked away. The Cousin on the floor got to his feet and brushed at his uniform.

“Go to the ships and lift off! Lift off!” Reen shrieked into the terminal. He punched the controls. “Get to the ships and lift off!”

The floor slipped a little beneath him. He staggered. The Cousin on the floor uttered an astonished cry, and the building moved again.

Reen pounded the controls so hard, his hand went numb. “Get to the ships!”

The walls and floor shook. With a wail of terror, the Cousin ran to the hall.

The next explosion was more than motion; it was sound, too. A bass rumble, and tenor Cousin shrieks. Somewhere in the complex a wall had been breached.

Reen ran into the hall, pulling the gun from the bag. Ahead of him Cousins were standing stock-still, watching smoke pour down the corridor.

“Run!” he shouted. But they didn’t run. They couldn’t. Cousins were genetically incapable of either fight or flight.

Suddenly soldiers, too, were running in the corridor. Reen watched as a man ran a tiny Cousin down and crushed his head against the wall.

Reen lifted the gun and fired. The man reeled back a couple of steps, then tried to rush Reen, but his legs weren’t working well and he toppled.

The humans looked up from their murder like lions disturbed from a kill. Their arms were brown to the elbow with blood, and their eyes were wild with strange excitement.

They blocked the only exit Reen knew. He didn’t know how to get out. Far to the back of the building he could hear the high, thin cries of the dying.

The closest soldier lifted his rifle and aimed it at Reen. Cousins didn’t understand battle, they didn’t understand killing, but what they knew was quickness. Precision. The automatic in Reen’s hand barked once, and the man fell. The other soldiers retreated.

No one had told them a Cousin would fight back, Reen thought as he fled down a right-hand hall. Marian must have promised it would be easy.

A Cousin hunkered in a corner, babbling. Reen tried to grab him, but the Cousin pulled away.

“Come with me!” Reen urged.

The Cousin’s small body shook. He had wrapped his arms around his knees, as if to make himself a smaller target. His mouth kept moving.

Reen left him.

The smoke was so thick that Reen wasn’t sure in which direction he was going. Around a bend, the peppery sweet smell of blood hit him, and he saw that the corridor was littered with black-uniformed bodies. A section of the ceiling had fallen, exposing the building to a flood of sunlight. At his feet a severed Cousin head lay like a gray basketball.

Reen ran down another hall. Near the end were two doors. He blundered through the one on the right, into blue. The blue of nests. The blue of sleep. It was silent, everything in order. The meditation room was cool and serene in the manner of Cousins.

He lowered the gun and noticed that his arms were aching. The room greeted him with its distant welcome, as it might have greeted anyone. A smell in it of calm, and the light, heady spice of rest.

Looking down, he saw that his uniform and his boots were filthy. How tired he suddenly was. The gun dropped from his fingers and hit the floor with a clank.

He gasped, realizing he had very nearly dozed off. Not sleep. No, not at all. The little death.

Panicky, he bent and grabbed the gun. The little death tugging at him, he whirled to the door. It opened, and he was facing a human.

The man was in camouflage. His helmet was off, his uniform blouse askew. His eyes widened at Reen’s unexpected appearance. His right hand came up, lifting a pistol.

There was no hatred in the man’s face, only mild surprise, as though he had met someone he recognized at a party.
Oh, hello,
he might have said,
and how are you?
Instead, he fired.

Reen heard the boom, saw the flame from the muzzle, felt hot gunpowder stipple his cheek. Before the soldier could pull the trigger again, Reen fired. The man crumpled.

Reen squeezed himself through the left door the moment it started opening. Outside, the air was cold, the wind rank with oily smoke. Ahead of him the Cousin ships sat untenanted on their pads. He ran to the nearest and threw himself into the seat. As the ship lifted, he looked down.

All of Anacostia was burning, and the ruins of the Cousin center squatted in that inferno, one entire side of it open to the smoky sky.

Reen clipped the control ball southeast, and the ship hurled itself over Suitland Parkway toward Andrews. Tanks were moving on the Beltway, and fighter planes sailed the bright air.

As he passed over Andrews, what he saw made him weak. Loving Helpers were stacked at the fences, thousands and thousands of Loving Helpers, eight and ten deep.

At the Cousin Place he settled the ship onto the tarmac. Cousins were moving back and forth from the building to the largest ships, carrying boxes. Reen trotted past them to the door where Tali and the Sleep Master were standing.

“Forget the supplies and records,” Reen told them. “Just get on the ship. Anacostia’s on fire.”

Tali looked away, but the Sleep Master didn’t. He stared hard into Reen’s eyes.

“The Helpers won’t stop them!” Reen’s voice rose in frustration. “Listen to me. They have guns! They have a new toxin. They– The Helpers won’t get close enough to them to matter!”

The Sleep Master looked at Reen with contempt. “Leave. Go where you wish. You are not wanted here.”

Perhaps because the Sleep Master had spoken, Tali at last found the courage to turn around. “It is your fault. All of it. Your fault. Go to your humans. See if they love you now.”

Reen could hear the faraway rattle of machine-gun fire and the first reedy screams of the Helpers.

A bomber flew low, thunder in its wake. The ground shook. The Cousins carrying boxes ducked. And the entire western perimeter of Andrews went up in black smoke and red flame. It was as though the sky let go a cloudburst of fire.

From the throats of the few surviving Helpers came a shrill lamentation. Tali clapped his hands over his ears.

The Sleep Master’s face changed. “Quick,” he said to Tali. “Get the Cousins on board.”

Tali hesitated. His hands dropped. “The Helpers ...”

“Gone. All that are not gone are insane. Get the Cousins now.”

Reen saw small bodies dancing in the hellish flames, saw demented Helpers, their mouths wide, running in panicked circles.

“Leave here,” the Sleep Master told Reen.

“Yes,” Reen said, nodding. “Yes.”

He walked wearily to the nearest runner but halted when he saw the huge shape emerging from the building. Large as a room, slow and ponderous as a cloud. Sunlight turned the female’s skin pearlescent.

Tali was barking orders, and the Cousins attending the female were trying to avoid her tail. She flowed over the tarmac, her body rippling.

Reen called to the Sleep Master, “This is wrong! The female never leaves the chamber! Let her die!”

The Sleep Master’s eyes were as dark and expressionless as berries.

“You can’t take a full-grown female on the ship! The attraction of the Communal Mind will be too strong! The Cousins can’t fight it! She’ll kill someone! You know that!”

The Sleep Master turned away.

The Cousins were trying to nudge the creature up the ramp, but she was balking. Terrified of approaching too close, they were prodding her with sticks, with raised voices.

She wasn’t moving. And Reen knew that Tali wouldn’t let the ships leave without her.

Without stopping to consider the enormity of it, Reen put his hand into the bag and brought out the gun. Tali saw him first. His mouth dropped. He held up his hand like a policeman ordering traffic to stop.

Around him Cousins were shouting, shouting at the stubborn female, shouting at Reen. Their voices were all but drowned out by the screeches of the Loving Helpers.

With shaking hands, Reen aimed. In front of him, Cousins scattered. Even Tali stepped away. The female inched around as though she was planning a return to the building.

Something hit Reen in the back. He staggered, fought to keep himself upright. But lethargy sucked him down. Over his shoulder he caught a glimpse of the Sleep Master’s face.

The gun dropped from Reen’s hand and clattered to the asphalt. He felt a claw rake his side only to be stopped by something hard in his pocket. Remotely he felt the Sleep Master’s question the instant before they were both claimed by the murk of Communal Mind.

“The tape,” he whispered.

BLUE.
An Eerie and empty nest blue. A sensation of heaviness and a vague ache in his chest. Reen hung in sleep like a sodden log below a river’s surface.

He drifted, wanted to sink further, but there was no drag of Communal Mind to pull him down. Unable to sink, he tried to rise but was swept by a current of exhaustion. In a timeless eddy he waited until, with a groan, he forced himself to sit up.

He was in a nest; the niches around him were vacant, haunted not by Communal Mind but by stale and long-abandoned spice. He swung his legs out and tried to stand, but his rubbery knees nearly gave out on him. Another smell overlaid the sleep: a fetid smell of human decay. He looked down at himself and saw that his uniform was stiff with dried blood.

Holding on to a wall for balance, he walked the empty tomb of the nest. Was this Andrews? And if so, where were the Cousins? Had they left him to face the humans alone?

He paused at the entrance to a hall. Ceiling lights sensed his presence and lit up in welcoming sequence. At the end of the hall was a door. He walked to it and found that it was locked. He rested there a while, leaning against the wall, letting his body, then his mind, gather the energy for the long trek to the baths.

The baths were neat and vacant. When he stripped off his uniform, he noticed the tape recorder was gone. Just below the center of his chest was a perfectly round bruise with an angry brown dot at its center. When he lowered himself into the water, he saw that his arms and legs were trembling, as if he had slept three hundred years and awakened palsied with age.

When he had finished bathing, he limped up the steps of the pool, found a uniform in a nearby closet, and put it on. Then he walked aimlessly through the strange silence of the abandoned nest, feeling a loneliness so keen that he wished he could end it by crawling into a niche and pulling oblivion in after him.

Where were they? Where were the Cousins? Why had they left him alone? He remembered the video of the Helper, how, without sight but with unerring precision, it had sensed the location of its Brothers.

Circling past the hall again, he stopped. The lights were blazing, and at the end near the door, Tali and the Sleep Master waited.

“The little death clings to you, Reen,” the Sleep Master said. “You slept, and I thought you would die from it.”

With that, he turned. The door opened for him, and he and Tali walked through.

Reen followed. The neighboring room was pale gray. Against a curved wall on the left was a row of chairs, where Tali seated himself. To the right, a single window looked out on a barren plain above which hung a slice of turquoise Earth.

Reen walked to the window and looked across the moon’s dry sea. To either side of him the huge Cousin complex rose in stately billows that made Reen feel light-headed and small, like a bird lost among clouds.

His eyes rose to the white-whorled Earth. Over the eastern Pacific was a storm, dazzling as new-fallen snow. Reen wondered how they would live with the news, this fecund race gone barren. He wondered with what savage grief they would cling to the last of their children.

He took a breath. “How long have I been asleep?”

“Two weeks,” the Sleep Master said. “I came every day to see if you were breathing. To touch you and feel your thoughts.”

Reen pictured the old Cousin’s hand on him, examining him for life as Reen had once examined Tali. He remembered feeling the darkness in his Brother and wondered if what the Sleep Master felt had been sadness. “There was a recorder in my pocket. It’s not there now.”

The Sleep Master said, “I have it.”

“And?”

“I will keep it.” The Sleep Master walked to Reen, stopped just at his shoulder, and looked out the window. “The Community is nearly gone.”

Reen put a steadying hand to the wall. “How many were saved?”

“Forty-three.”

Forty-three out of more than three thousand. The humans had nearly destroyed the Community.

“Never before have we waged war, Reen, and for good reason. The Cousins cannot sleep with visions of blood and death in their minds.”

Of course the Cousins couldn’t sleep. The butchery was over, but chaos possessed the collective Mind. As Reen himself had learned with the murders of Hopkins and Quen, killing was best done at a distance.

Kill but do not look,
his ancestors might have said.
If you look, you will see brain on the floor. If you look, you will see your victim beg for mercy. If you dare look, you will see a beloved world die.

History was supposed to be instructive, but Reen had ignored its lessons. He had wanted to know Angela’s other parent, that hot-blooded human half, and had ended up with his Brothers’ blood on his hands.

Three thousand Cousins. And how many humans? One last short generation, and he would kill them all.

He looked up. The Sleep Master was regarding him thoughtfully. “Tali cannot lead,” he said.

Hope stirred in Reen’s chest. “So you must abdicate.”

With a final exhausted twitch, hope died. “If you want me to leave ...”

“There are those who would leave with you. Who are still loyal. It would deplete the Community even further. Tali needs you to acknowledge him as First, and that is what I am asking.”

Reen shot an angry look at Tali. “He is no innocent. The tape ...”

Tali jumped to his feet. “You are the one who brought this destruction on our heads, not me. You are the one who trusted humans too much, who–”

The Sleep Master whirled to Tali. “Silence!” he roared. “You will be silent! And take your seat! Remember, Tali-ja, that Reen is your Brother!”

Tali quickly sat.

“You can’t do this,” Reen argued. “Even under rebuke you can’t let him be First. If you have heard what the tape says, then you know Tali has no heart for rule.”

The Sleep Master took his eyes from Reen and let them rest on the star-strung space in the window. “I know he has no heart, and I know now where your heart belongs. But what matters is that the Community find its way out of turmoil. Tali was always the more ordered, the more disciplined Brother, so it is Tali we need. But Tali knows that should he seek revenge on the humans, I will use the tape against him.” The old Cousin’s expression softened. “Reen, I will hold your wishes dear, as though they were my own.”

The Sleep Master was asking him to die. Reen opened his mouth, found himself saying, “How?”

Would they give him back the gun and leave him alone in the room, as courteous humans used to do with even more courteous traitors? Or would they open the door to the vacuum and expect him to walk outside?

“The sleep is thin, and only one thing can make it better. You have been tested and found viable. Go meditate your decision now, as custom dictates. Remember, not for Tali’s goals but for simple, full sleep this is what we must do.”

Simple, full sleep. Reen’s exhaustion was back. His head was heavy, his arms and legs felt weighted, and he fought to swim against the current of the old Cousin’s words. Somewhere in that cold numbing deluge was meaning, but Reen was too tired to find it.

“I have chosen you to be consort,” the Sleep Master said.